


Waking

by Leyenn



Series: The Firing Line [5]
Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Episode Tag, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-18
Updated: 2009-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 06:27:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a moment at the bar.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waking

**Author's Note:**

> Post-ep for _Mind War_.

"Just water?"

Talia looks up, surprised. Two stools away today, she's sitting there: for a moment there seems to be kindness in those eyes meeting her own, behind the silent expression bent over a clear-filled glass. Not water.

And those eyes, endless, are still watching her when she comes back to herself from that longed-for moment. An eyebrow quirks; so very out of place alongside the daydream of kindness in Ivanova's eyes, but somehow an even stronger pull, showing as it does the reality of this woman. Wry, funny, dark, quiet and dangerous in equal measures. A guarded mind, a pool of contradictions shallow enough to drown in.

And those eyes are still watching her. That voice, carefully, is sharp and insistent. "Something stronger?"

She shouldn't. Her control is slippery at best after today, thinly held in a grip that feels clumsy. Someone else's cards are in her hand, extra marbles in the bag that she can't see to touch, and it frightens the hell out of her what Jason might have put there. Even more not to know, to fear any moment making the station shake apart and losing her world to the man she's already lost.

"Wine. Please." When Ivanova's look tightens, she flushes with easy embarrassment. "White," because there's too much blood bared on this table between them already.

"White wine. And another one," the small glass clinking against the bar. Talia hardly sees the barman there, but somewhere in the minutes it takes her to sit a long-stemmed glass appears, invitingly chilled through the black leather that encases her always.

"I'm sorry." An apology without glance or expression, but sincere over a sip of vodka. "About Ironheart." Another sip, thoughtful. "The Commander said he was your friend."

"He was my lover." She wants it to shock, she wants to feel a reaction. In either of them.

The eyebrow rises higher, without shock or surprise or even the intimation of knowing. Not even a blink. After a minute of silence and the draining of the glass, "Then I am sorry."

To Garibaldi she would say _it's all right_ and mean _please, leave me alone_; to Commander Sinclair she would say _thank you, I appreciate that, thank you,_ and perhaps she might mean it a little.

She says, "So am I," and she means for Jason and Alfred Bester and a man in a grey suit once a week. She means it for everything, just for a moment, until the weight of it all is too much and it has to shatter, pieces of hope all over the floor of her life.

Ivanova snorts and offers her chit across the counter to a nameless background man, a distraction hardly noticed. "But you still don't admit what they are."

She can barely find it within herself to speak it, the rebuttal so obviously expected. "They're necessary," but there isn't anything of necessity in her voice. "We need them-"

"Maybe you do." And then Ivanova does glance her way, and even that glance is too much anger to bear. "Maybe you need someone to control you, someone to be afraid of at night. Maybe you need ripping apart like that, over and over, until they've broken you completely. Maybe that's all you can bring yourself to want from your life. That doesn't mean you make that choice for everyone who's like you." She slides the glass across the bar, a pebble across the surface of a stream; for a second as she stands and their lives cross, she's closer, and that voice is a fire in Talia's ears and a buzzing at her mind.

"It doesn't mean they should _like_ it."

And if she knows the silent ripples left in her wake as she walks away, if she wants to see the look she leaves on Talia's face, still she never turns around.

  


*

  



End file.
